land value tax

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

One of the best known examples is Denmark, which has municipal taxes based on land values as well as a 1% tax paid to the state for property worth up to around £340,000 and 3% for any higher values. Australia has operated a system of applying land value tax that predates the creation of the independent country in 1901. The tax is administered at the state level and today there are two states which operate a universal land value tax, Queensland and New South Wales. The tax is applied to land regardless of whether income is earned from it, though primary residences are generally exempt. This exemption has the effect of removing around 60% of land by value from the tax base (Henry et al., 2009), but in 2015 land value tax still raised a total of AU$7.6 billion across Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2015).

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In the modern era, as the economic importance of land shifted from the production of food and other consumption goods, so the importance of land taxes for state revenue has declined, and has only partially been replaced by taxes on property such as business rates and housing transaction taxes (see Chapter 3). Ongoing taxes on the value of land – such as the land value tax advocated by Henry George ([1879] 1979) – remain many economists’ preferred mechanism for reducing economic rents (see Chapter 7). Land value tax clearly has many theoretical advantages, in that it reduces rather than increases distortions on investment decisions, lowers property prices by reducing speculative pressures on them, and forces the owners of landed property to make rational decisions about the amount of property that they wish to hold based on the ongoing costs.

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Property taxes generally tend to be politically unpopular because of their visibility or ‘salience’ – they are generally administered as annual or monthly demands for payment by local or regional authorities, in contrast to less obtrusive consumption, income or national insurance taxes (Cabral and Hoxby, 2012).3 So while the economic case for land value tax is essentially uncontested, political and also practical challenges remain. Practical and political challenges around the implementation of land value tax The practical issues concern the perceived challenges associated with LVT’s implementation. LVT requires land values to be assessed fairly and accurately on a regular basis. There is currently no reliable published data on land values in the UK, and residential property has not been revalued for the purposes of the council tax since April 1991.4 However, that is not to say that establishing such a regime is impossible.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

Beyond these two measures, the English Land Commission should be tasked with reporting on the best form of land value tax to levy in England. Land value tax is often proposed by land activists as a solution to the housing crisis – indeed, to some devotees of the thinker Henry George, land value tax is a silver bullet solution to all our woes. I don’t agree, though I do think it’s a proposal that has many merits. But the devil is in the detail. Do you just change business rates to reflect land values, for instance – or go the whole hog by abolishing council tax in favour of a land value tax on residential properties? And what would be the social ramifications of doing so – not to mention the political risks if it were designed in the wrong way?

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And what would be the social ramifications of doing so – not to mention the political risks if it were designed in the wrong way? Part of the reason why there’s been no attempt at implementing a land value tax for decades is because there’s been no serious political discussion about one. When Labour’s 2017 manifesto dared to even hint at exploring land value taxation, it was jumped on by the Conservatives, who slammed it as a ‘garden tax’. My proposal would be to open up the political space for a grown-up debate about land value taxes via the new Land Commission, armed with the data and resources needed to model different scenarios and make a clear recommendation. 3.

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He railed against ‘the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing’. Churchill’s solution to this social evil was to introduce a land value tax. A 20 per cent tax would be levied on the future unearned increase in land values. To do so, however, would require a full survey of the ownership and value of land across the country. The Chancellor, Lloyd George, put forward such a tax in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, alongside hikes in income tax for the wealthy and a super-tax on the very richest.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

The most effective approach to spurring denser and more clustered development is to switch from our current local reliance on the property tax to a land value tax. Whereas the property tax taxes land and the structures on top of it, a land value tax taxes the underlying value of the land itself. In this way, it creates significant incentives for property owners to put that land to its most intensive use. The basic idea goes back to David Ricardo, who developed influential theories of free trade and comparative advantage in the early eighteenth century. Ricardo saw the unearned income that comes from land as pure waste. The most influential proponent of the land value tax was the late nineteenth-century economist Henry George.

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The High Line Park in New York, for instance, created a huge increase in the land value of surrounding property, which generated windfalls for real estate developers, but little if any of those gains were returned to the park or the broader community. The same is true on a smaller scale in virtually every urban neighborhood that is seeing an influx of new residents, new restaurants and cafés, new and better schools, or reductions in crime. A land value tax can help ensure that those benefits are shared more broadly by the public, because the rise in the value of the land that occurs through these broader neighborhood improvements is also captured by the tax and returned to the public, where it can potentially be used to invest in needed services and help close economic gaps in the community.

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The basic idea, referred to as tax increment local transfers, is to allow the residents of neighborhoods to share in the tax revenues that come from new development—for example, by rebating and reducing their own property taxes over a period of time.11 As politically difficult as it might seem to change local tax structures in these ways, the land value tax is attracting broad support from a wide array of economists and urbanists on both sides of the aisle. It is a move that would encourage more building where it is needed, increase density and clustering, and help to make both our cities and the economy stronger. INVEST IN THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR DENSITY AND GROWTH Infrastructure is an important, and necessary, piece of the puzzle.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice
by Molly Scott Cato
Published 16 Dec 2008

EU governments raised considerable revenue by auctioning off the right to use various bandwidths, some £22.5 billion in the case of the UK government. For green economists such commons are shared resources, the bounty of nature, whose value should be shared. If it is to be exploited by a few then they should pay for that privilege. The Land Value Tax, or as Robertson refers to it, the ‘Land-Rent Tax’: is a tax on the annual rental site value of land. The annual rental site value is the rental value which a particular piece of land would have if there were no buildings or improvements on it. It is the value of a site, as provided by nature and as affected for better or worse by the activities of the community at large.

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Since land is a ‘common treasury’ or ‘common wealth’ it follows that it should be shared fairly between those who have a need for it, and according to that need. Taxing land The concept of the ‘common treasury’ continues to be popular among radical economists and was translated into a powerful policy prescription that has LAND AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 191 been adopted by greens in many countries: the land value tax. The idea of ‘the single tax’ was made popular by Henry George, whose book Progress and Poverty (1880) became an international best-seller and who achieved the unlikely feat of interesting millions the world over in both economics and taxation!13 The arguments made by George chimed well with the third principle outlined above, namely that the value gained from land should be shared between all members of the community.

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In cities, activities take less land area per head, but more land value, because the price of city land is hundreds, sometimes thousands of times higher than the price of rural land, per unit area. (Henry George Institute website) The idea of a land tax is taken into policy circles under a number of different names, including Site Rental Tax and Land Value Tax, but the basic underlying principle is the same: land is the most valuable resource available to the human community and thus the value derived from it should be shared between all members of that community. This is the argument based on fairness, but it is matched by an argument based on economic efficiency, with which some green economists would be more uneasy: The arguments for a land-rent tax are to do with fairness and economic efficiency.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

He even turned it into a postcard to spread the message far and wide.36 Political performance art by Fay Lewis, Rockford, Illinois, 1914. George’s proposal for a land-value tax – an annual levy on underlying land values as a fair means of generating public revenue – echoed John Stuart Mill’s earlier call to tax ‘rentier landlords’ who ‘grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economising’.37 Inspired by such reasoning, land-value taxes are now in use – albeit in diluted form – from Denmark and Kenya to the US, Hong Kong and Australia. But taxation to George was essentially a substitute for a more systemic fix: land, he believed, should be owned in common by a community, rather than by landowners.

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John Stuart Mill also clearly saw the importance of Earth’s materials and energy in all economic production, but he wanted to distinguish social science from natural science and so (rather unhelpfully) proposed that the field of political economy focus on the laws of the mind, not the laws of matter.18 In the 1870s the radical American thinker Henry George pointed out that land gained value for its owners even if they did nothing to improve it, and so he advocated a land-value tax – prompting his influential (and land-owning) opponents to downplay the importance of land in economic theory from then on.19 The upshot of all this? The classical economists, led by Smith and Ricardo, had recognised labour, land and capital as three distinct factors of production. But by the late twentieth century, mainstream economics had reduced the focus to just two: labour and capital – and if ever land did get a mention, it was as just another form of capital, interchangeable with all the rest.20 As a result, mainstream economics is still taught today with scant attention paid to the living planet that supports us and the blazing star whose energy we depend upon.21 It relegates ecological stresses such as climate change, deforestation, and soil degradation to the periphery of economic thought, until they become so severe that their damaging economic impacts demand attention.

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The game’s inventor Elizabeth Magie was an outspoken supporter of Henry George’s ideas and when she first created her game in 1903 she gave it two very different sets of rules to be played in turn. Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (echoing George’s call for a land value tax), and the game was won (by all) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the second, ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, players gained by charging rent to those who were unfortunate enough to land on their properties – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest was the sole winner.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Nicola Harley, “Theresa May Unveils Plan to Build New Council Houses,” Telegraph, May 13, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/13/theresa-may-unveils-plan-build-new-council-houses/; see also “Forward, Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and a Prosperous Future: The Conservative and Unionist Party, Manifesto 2017,” Conservatives.com, 2017, 70–72, https://www.conservatives.com/manifesto. 42. A good overview of the land value tax is provided in “Why Land Value Taxes Are So Popular, Yet So Rare,” Economist, November 10, 2014, https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/11/economist-explains-0. Interestingly, the tax has strong supporters on both the left and the right. See Andy Hull, “In Land Revenue: The Case for a Land Value Tax in the UK,” Labour List, May 8, 2013, https://labourlist.org/2013/05/in-land-revenue-the-case-for-a-land-value-tax-in-the-uk/; and Daran Sarma, “The Case for a Land Value Tax,” Institute of Economic Affairs, February 15, 2016, https://iea.org.uk/blog/the-case-for-a-land-value-tax-0. 43.

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The process of obtaining permits should be made much easier, and disputes about them resolved much more quickly.39 Towns and villages should have less power to veto developments in their jurisdiction.40 States should do more to help in the construction of new apartments, whether directly through the addition of new units of public housing or indirectly through financial assistance to local municipalities.41 Finally, the introduction of land value taxes—which levy the same charge on a patch of land irrespective of whether its owner lets it lie barren or decides to erect a building on it—would provide a strong incentive to build new homes.42 A different tax system could also improve the distribution of housing. Higher rates on second homes and vacant properties could drive up occupancy rates.43 Existing incentives for rich people to buy bigger homes or purchase additional properties—like the mortgage-interest tax deduction in the United States or the easy availability of buy-to-let mortgages in the United Kingdom—could be abolished.44 None of these policies will be easy to pass: Since the equity they own in their homes is a primary source of wealth for many middle-class people, they have a strong incentive to vote for higher home prices.45 And since a precipitous drop in housing prices can, as the world painfully learned in 2008, lead to a huge short-term shock, politicians are understandably worried about any policy that might pop a speculative bubble.46 But if we take housing seriously as an artificial restraint on our affluence—and thus a danger to our democracies—there are ways to compensate the losers of falling home prices, and to make potential gains more salient to the winners.

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See Andy Hull, “In Land Revenue: The Case for a Land Value Tax in the UK,” Labour List, May 8, 2013, https://labourlist.org/2013/05/in-land-revenue-the-case-for-a-land-value-tax-in-the-uk/; and Daran Sarma, “The Case for a Land Value Tax,” Institute of Economic Affairs, February 15, 2016, https://iea.org.uk/blog/the-case-for-a-land-value-tax-0. 43. A number of cities and countries, from Paris and New York to Italy, have been moving toward taxing second homes more heavily. See Megan McArdle, “Own a Second Home in New York? Prepare for a Higher Tax Bill,” Atlantic, February 11, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/02/own-a-second-home-in-new-york-prepare-for-a-higher-tax-bill/71144/; Feargus O’Sullivan, “Paris Sets Its Sights on Owners of Second Homes,” Citylab, June 15, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/paris-wants-to-raise-second-homes-taxes-five-times/487124/; Gisella Ruccia, “Imu, Renzi: ‘Via tassa su prima casa anche per i ricchi perché impossibile riforma del Catasto,’” Il Fatto Quotidiano, September 15, 2015, http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/09/15/imu-renzi-via-tassa-su-prima-casa-anche-per-i-ricchi-perche-impossibile-riforma-del-catasto/414080/.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

This is known as ‘land banking’ and you might think of it as a contemporary form of the enclosure that took place in Early Modern England when wealthy people took over common land so that they could charge other people to live or farm on it. You don’t need to look far to see it happening. Consider Oulton, where an investment fund bought up land and waited for it to become more desirable before redeveloping it, displacing the people who call it home in the process. A Land Value Tax could help solve this problem and curb this practice. It might not be popular, but taxes never are. Land Value Taxes are a way of taxing the unearned income that large landowners enjoy when they own prime real estate – for example, a disused carpark in the centre of London, or an empty townhouse in Manchester. Throughout history, economists have advocated such a tax.

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the Affordable Homes Programme: www.gov.uk/guidance/apply-for-affordable-housing-funding the government was finally asking builders: Vicky Spratt, ‘Leasehold homeowners are struggling with extortionate service charge costs, but change may be on the horizon’, i Paper, 19 January 2022, inews.co.uk/opinion/columnists/leasehold-homeowners-service-charge-costs-extortionate-change-horizon-1410222 in the twelve months to December 2021: ‘Index of Private Housing Rental Prices, UK: January 2022’, Office for National Statistics (16 February 2022), www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/indexofprivatehousingrentalprices/january2022 a contemporary form of the enclosure: For more reading on this try Brett Christophers’ The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (London: Verso, 2019). A Land Value Tax could help: If you are interested in the idea of a Land Value Tax, I’d recommend Josh Ryan-Collins’ 2017 book Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (London: Zed Books), which he co-authored with Laurie Macfarlane and Toby Lloyd. Epilogue ‘Here you come upon …’: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2001).

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These were the sort of claims that would have been unthinkable for a Conservative housing secretary to make just a year before – perhaps there’s hope that future politicians in the not-so-distant future will be able to make even more radical suggestions on taxing landlords fairly, introducing a Land Value Tax, or even setting a target for house price inflation. Whatever the solution politicians eventually settle on, private renting is no longer a stopgap for many, and it is not a tenure of choice – people rent from private landlords because they have no other options. The damage being done cannot be overstated and, for as long as the housing emergency continues, we will be poorer, less equal, less healthy, more unhappy and less environmentally friendly.

The Joy of Tax
by Richard Murphy
Published 30 Sep 2015

At the same time, local authority taxation, which is largely based upon the outdated valuation of properties (a crude tax, created in a hurry to replace the hated poll tax), has become deeply dysfunctional for that reason. As a consequence land value taxation has now become essential. Land value taxation should apply to all land value, without exception, where the land value is the amount for which the land could be let without having been developed. The land value tax due on an empty plot would therefore be the same as that due on the house next door. As already noted, this is an ideal tax to be managed by a devolved authority or regional government. The charge would be made on the owner, and not on the occupier of the land. In other words, this is a tax paid by landlords and the owner-occupiers of land.

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Fourth, this tax shifts the burden from those who are less able to pay it – that is tenants – to those who always can, who are landlords. As a result this tax tends to be progressive in its nature, which most other land-based taxes ever charged in countries like the UK have never been, and which the UK council tax is very definitely not. Finally, because land use tends to improve when land value tax is in use yields rise, there are economic gains as a result and reduced social cost from vacant land and so the system provides net economic gains beyond revenue raised. This consideration of direct charges on wealth does not, however, bring to a close the consideration of wealth taxation. Transfers of wealth provide another basis for tax.

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It makes no sense at all that this tax, which is charged on the occupiers and not the owners of land, and which encourages second-property ownership and properties being left vacant, whilst the fact that charges are capped at what are now ludicrously low valuations renders it regressive, should continue in existence. I can therefore confirm that arrangements are to be made to introduce a land value tax in England and that devolved governments will be encouraged to consider similar taxes in the parts of the country for which they are responsible. Such a change will take time, and care will be needed with the design of this tax. This means that its introduction will be delayed for at least three years, but I can set out its design principles now.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

Adam Smith thought ‘nothing [could] be more reasonable’ than such a land value tax; Milton Friedman, inimitably, considered it the ‘least bad tax’.2 Henry George, writing in the 1870s, is especially closely associated with the idea. Today, Wolf is one high-profile advocate; another is the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The reason that economists – even, perhaps especially, those in the mainstream – are so enamoured of the idea of a land value tax is that it is, on their terms, efficient. It does not distort incentives, because the supply of land is effectively fixed. Again, a land value tax is not simply wishful thinking, a mere impractical fancy.

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Kivell, Land and the City: Patterns and Processes of Urban Change (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 109–10. 1 M. Neutze, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Public Land Ownership in Canberra and Stockholm to the Early 1980s’, Scandinavian Housing and Planning Research 6: 4 (1989), pp. 189–99, at p. 191. 2 ‘Why Land Value Taxes Are So Popular, Yet So Rare’, Economist, 10 November 2014. 1 R. Dye and R. England, ‘Assessing the Theory and Practice of Land Value Taxation’, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010, p. 2 – available at lincolninst.edu. 2 D. Massey and A. Catalano, Capital and Land: Private Landownership by Capital in Great Britain (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 12. 3 L.

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Ball, ‘Chasing a Snail: Innovation and Housebuilding Firms’ Strategies’, Housing Studies 14 (1999), pp. 9–22, at pp. 14, 19–20. 2 T. Dolphin and M. Griffith, Forever Blowing Bubbles? Housing’s Role in the UK Economy (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2011), p. 2. 3 Ibid., p. 26. 4 Molior London, ‘Barriers to Housing Delivery’, December 2012, pp. 9, 23 – pdf available at london.gov.uk. 1 A. Wightman, ‘A Land Value Tax for England: Fair, Efficient, Sustainable’, March 2013, p. 5 – pdf available at andywightman.com. 2 ‘UK’s Enviably Smooth Economic Recovery’, Financial Times, 16 September 2015. 1 O. Wainwright, ‘Made in London No More: Will Property Speculation Kill Industry in the Capital?’, Guardian, 6 February 2017. 2 J.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

The owner pays £1,369 in council tax, or 0.001 per cent of its value.9 Last year the Independent revealed that the Sultan of Brunei pays only £32 a month more for his pleasure dome in Kensington Palace Gardens than some of the poorest people in the same borough.10 A mansion tax – slapped down by David Cameron in October11 – is only the beginning of what the owners of such places should pay. For the simplest, fairest and least avoidable levy is one which the major parties simply will not contemplate. It’s called land value tax. The term is a misnomer. It’s not really a tax. It’s a return to the public of the benefits we have donated to the landlords. When land rises in value, the government and the people deliver a great unearned gift to those who happen to own it. In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus: Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still.

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He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.12 Who was this firebrand? Winston Churchill. As Churchill, Adam Smith and many others have pointed out,13 those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. They ‘levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry’.14 Land value tax recoups this toll. It has a number of other benefits.15 It stops the speculative land hoarding that prevents homes from being built. It ensures that the most valuable real estate – in city centres – is developed first, discouraging urban sprawl. It prevents speculative property bubbles, of the kind that have recently trashed the economies of Ireland, Spain and other nations and which make rents and first homes so hard to afford.

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Because it does not affect the supply of land (they stopped making it some time ago), it cannot cause the rents that people must pay to the landlords to be raised. It is easy to calculate and hard to avoid: you can’t hide your land in London in a secret account in the Cayman Islands. And it could probably discharge the entire deficit. It is altogether remarkable, in these straitened and inequitable times, that land value tax is not at the heart of the current political debate. Perhaps it is a sign of how powerful the rent-seeking class in Britain has become. While the silence surrounding this obvious solution exposes Labour’s limitations, it also exposes the contradiction at heart of the Conservative Party. The Conservatives claim, in David Cameron’s words, to be ‘the party of enterprise’.16 But those who benefit most from its policies are those who are rich already.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 19 Jan 2021

Louis (courtesy of Getty Images) Map showing gap in Denver beltway (courtesy of AAA) Rocky Flats plant (courtesy of Getty Images) Palestine border wall (courtesy of Getty Images) Soviet propaganda poster for Ukraine Memorial to Ukrainian victims (courtesy of Getty Images) Strawberry Festival in Bellevue, Washington Minidoka, Idaho, concentration camp (courtesy of Alamy) Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (courtesy of Alamy) Whina Cooper on the Land March, New Zealand Queen Elizabeth signs apology (courtesy of Getty Images) Island of Ulva (courtesy of Getty Images) Isle of Eigg (courtesy of Getty Images) Sgurr of Eigg, Scotland Cecil Rhodes bestriding Africa (courtesy of Getty Images) Violent occupation of a colonial farm, Zimbabwe (courtesy of Alamy) John Muir (courtesy of Getty Images) Miwok Indians in Yosemite Vinoba Bhave (courtesy of Getty Images) Henry George (courtesy of Alamy) Land Value Tax wagon (courtesy of Alamy) Land being inundated (courtesy of David Freese) Chief Sealth (courtesy of Getty Images) Idealized vision of a yeoman farmer (courtesy of Alamy) Tolstoy and horse (courtesy of Getty Images) Prologue Uncommon Ground It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground.

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It raised sufficient funds to buy a 5000-acre farm in southwestern Georgia, and farmers developed it for twenty years. This experiment ultimately failed, but it set the movement in motion, generating enthusiasm among those in the community who followed such land-economy philosophers as Henry George,* the celebrated inventor of the radical idea of the land value tax. The Georgia model spread, slowly at first. It took root next in Cincinnati, then most significantly in three counties in Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain—where the local Champlain Housing Trust managed to acquire a sufficient acreage on which to build 2,300 apartments, more than four hundred single-family houses, and fifteen commercial buildings—giving work and shelter to some six thousand people, who otherwise would have struggled to find places to sleep.

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In Scotland trusts have permanent ownership of half a million acres, a figure that includes the aforementioned islands of Eigg and Ulva, in which the transfer of ownership from private to community involved some direction from government, rather than free-enterprise goodness, which appears to the hallmark of the movement across in America. The journalist and tax reform advocate Henry George was a hugely popular figure in late-nineteenth-century America with his 1879 book Progress and Poverty assuming magisterial authority. He proposed and advertised the consolidation of all revenue-raising efforts into a single Land Value Tax. It is one thing to take a progressive idea like the community land trust and employ it in a progressively minded state like Vermont, quite another to try it out in one of the more broken cities of America’s Rust Belt. But since 2008 a group of local activists has been experimenting with a raft of such radical ideas in the once spectacularly forlorn city of Cleveland, on the Ohio shores of Lake Erie.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

This was an extraordinary claim given Labour’s express pledge, not matched by Conservatives, not to raise taxes for the bottom 95 per cent. The basis of it was the Tory interpretation of Labour’s plan to investigate replacing the poll tax with the land value tax. Taking their estimate of the revenue that would be raised by such a tax, they claimed that, averaged out across households, Labour’s idea would treble the amount of tax they were paying. But, of course, the point of the land value tax is that it is progressive – most households would pay less, while the wealthiest property barons would pay a lot more.53 By and large, given the popularity of Labour’s manifesto, the Tories and their press supporters preferred to avoid talking too much about it, and keep the fire aimed at Corbyn’s record in the 1980s.

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, Telegraph, 19 April 2017. 43Graeme Demianyk, ‘Jeremy Corbyn was NOT “dancing a jig” before Remembrance Sunday service’, Huffington Post, 13 November 2016. 44Jon Craig, ‘Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denies supporting or meeting IRA’, Sky News, 26 May 2017 45Andrew Gilligan, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell’s close IRA links’, Telegraph, 10 October 2015; Claire Newell, Hayley Dixon, Luke Heighton, and Harry Yorke, ‘Exclusive: MI5 opened file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his IRA links’, Telegraph, 19 May 2017; Laura Hughes and Edward Malnick, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn’s three decades of blocking terror legislation’, Telegraph, 26 May 2017; Richard Dearlove, ‘Corbyn would not be allowed into security services, so he’s not fit for No 10’, Telegraph, 8 June 2017. 46Sean O’Callaghan, ‘Jeremy Corbyn might not have planted a bomb but he made it easier for those who did, says former IRA man’, Sun, 22 May 2017; Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Jeremy Corbyn boosted morale of IRA killers with his support and prolonged the violence leading to more deaths, IRA killer reveals’, Sun, 22 May 2017; Sean O’Callaghan, ‘Finucane should not have been killed – but he was in the IRA’, Telegraph, 18 April 2013; Cory Collusion Inquiry Report: Patrick Finucane, House of Commons, April 2004. 47David Trayner, ‘Claims Jeremy Corbyn funded “IRA bomber” turn out to be 30 years old – and inaccurate’, Independent, 20 September 2015. 48‘Jeremy Corbyn quizzed over IRA comments’, ITV News, 21 May 2017; Jessica Elgot, ‘Johnson accuses Corbyn of siding with UK’s enemies in fight on terror’, Guardian, 6 June 2017; Robert Booth, Martin Belam, and Maeve McClenaghan, ‘Tory attack ad misrepresents Corbyn views on IRA, says Labour’, Guardian, 2 June 2017. 49Kate Devlin, ‘Labour MPs urge Smith to attack Corbyn over IRA’, Evening Times, 18 August 2016; Kate McCann, ‘Labour’s Stoke candidate branded Jeremy Corbyn “IRA supporting friend of Hamas” and criticised Brexit’, Telegraph, 27 January 2017. 50James Forsythe, ‘Jeremy Corbyn always blames Britain first’, Spectator, 28 May 2017; Simon Heffer, ‘Jeremy Corbyn has long hated Britain’, Telegraph, 28 May 2017; editorial, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s intervention on terror is tasteless and wrong’, Telegraph, 26 May 2017; Steve Hawkes, ‘RED FLAG: outrage as it’s revealed Jeremy Corbyn will claim Britain’s war on terror is to blame for Manchester terror attack’, Sun, 25 May 2017; editorial, ‘An important speech from Jeremy Corbyn – but made at the wrong time’, Independent, 26 May 2017; Matthew Smith, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is on the right side of public opinion on foreign policy: except for the Falklands’, YouGov, 30 May 2017. 51Tom Batchelor, ‘British voters overwhelmingly back Labour’s manifesto policies, poll finds’, Independent, 11 May 2017. 52Will Dahlgren, ‘Voters choose greater equality over greater wealth’, YouGov, 30 April 2014; Will Dahlgren, ‘Nationalise energy and rail companies, say public’, YouGov, 4 November 2013; Patrick Butler, ‘UK survey finds huge support for ending austerity’, Guardian, 28 June 2017. 53Editorial, ‘The Guardian view on the Labour election manifesto: widening the bounds of the thinkable’, Guardian, 16 May 2017; editorial, ‘The Observer’s view on the Labour manifesto’, Observer, 14 May 2017; Andrew Grice, ‘Labour’s manifesto will be popular, but this election is about trust, not policies’, Independent, 16 May 2017; Nick Robinson, ‘No one should be surprised …’, Twitter.com, 20 May 2017; Jeremy Culley, ‘REVEALED: Labour plans to “TREBLE Council Tax plunging people into negative equity”’, Daily Star, 30 May 2017; Gordon Rayner, ‘Tax on homes “to treble under Labour plans for Land Value Tax”’, Telegraph, 29 May 2017; Jon Stone, ‘Labour looks to replace Council Tax with a Land Value Tax’, Independent, 16 May 2017. 54Macer Hall, ‘May’s plan for a Fairer Britain’, Daily Express, 18 May 2017; editorial, ‘DAILY MAIL COMMENT: as Mrs May unveils her manifesto, at last, we have a PM who is not afraid to be honest’, Daily Mail, 19 May 2017; editorial, ‘THE SUN SAYS: never in our history has a UK election thrown up such a clear-cut and obvious choice for Sun readers’, Sun, 19 May 2017; editorial, ‘The Guardian view on Theresa May’s manifesto: a new Toryism’, Guardian, 18 May 2017. 55Dawn Foster, ‘Theresa May’s manifesto shows that she is more right wing than Cameron ever dared to be’, Independent, 18 May 2017. 56Robert Booth, ‘Conservatives launch online offensive against Corbyn’, Guardian, 15 May 2017. 57Nicholas Cecil, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn beat Theresa May in the social media election war’, Evening Standard, 14 June 2017. 58Jim Waterson and Tom Phillips, ‘People on Facebook only want to share pro-Corbyn, anti-Tory news stories’, Buzzfeed, 7 May 2017; Ben Kentish, ‘Tories “spent more than £1m” on negative Facebook adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn’, Independent, 11 June 2017; Giles Turner and Jeremy Kahn, ‘U.K.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

High-income households would lose on average but relative to income the losses would be negligible. A more traditional proposal is a land value tax. Thomas Paine envisaged funding for his scheme coming from a ‘ground rent’ charged to property owners. Henry George campaigned for a land rent levy to finance a basic income. Land taxes would be progressive, since land ownership is broadly in line with income and wealth. And in principle they could raise large sums. According to estimates cited by The Economist, a land value tax of 5 per cent charged on all US land would raise over $1 trillion, enough to pay every American $3,500 a year.29 This is an attractive idea, especially since property taxes in most countries are a mess, often regressive and in need of reform.

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One would be to limit the taper so that housing benefit recipients would ‘pay’ (in lost benefit and higher taxes) no more than the top marginal rate of tax if they earned extra income. A second would be to hand over all housing-related spending to local authorities, which could adapt policy on building, rents and benefits to local circumstances. The third would be to pay a ‘basic rental income’ to everyone who rents rather than owns a property, financed by a land value tax. Of course, the UK housing situation is not unique. Other countries too face similar problems, especially the lack of affordable housing in the big cities and wide regional and urban/rural variations in housing costs. However, a number of northern European countries such as Germany, Sweden and France opted for more generous earnings-related social insurance benefits that enable most people to cover their rent.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Numerous other advanced industrialized nations have mechanisms to secure for society the uplift in land value that occurs when planning permissions are granted; examples include Hong Kong, South Korea and Germany.78 Meanwhile, a more generalized mechanism for preventing, or at least limiting, unearned increments, in place in various other countries, takes the form of property and land-value taxes.79 Even the United States levies property taxes, on both commercial and residential property. The UK is one of only a few advanced industrial countries that do not have any recurring tax on property or land values. As Tilford notes, a land-value tax not only ‘would make it more expensive to speculate on future rises in land values’, but would mean that, when such rises occur, ‘some of those gains would be captured by the government’.80 The reason the UK does not meaningfully tax privatized land-value gains is not that such taxation is impractical (as the experience of other countries has shown).

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Meanwhile, taxes on rentier assets and income streams could be introduced or, where they already exist, increased, thus discouraging rentierism. A prime example of such a tax would be a land-value tax, which, as we saw in Chapter 7, the UK does not currently levy. The lack of such a tax is one reason why the country is notable for such inefficient and plainly unproductive allocations of capital to land, with speculative ‘investors’ buying land and retaining it without developing it, purely in the hope that its value will increase, knowing that they are able to hold it tax-free. A land-value tax would act as another kind of negative reinforcer – motivating landowners to use their land, or pay.

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Pickard, ‘UK Labour Party Plans Land Law Shake-up to Cut Prices’, Financial Times, 29 April 2019. See also Labour Party, ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’, October 2017 – pdf available at labour. org.uk. 79. C. Lewis, ‘A Corbyn Government, Unlike New Labour, Would Tax the Rich Properly’, Guardian, 12 November 2018; A. Perkins, ‘Labour Says Land Value Tax Would Boost Local Government Budgets’, Guardian, 22 February 2018. 80. Labour Party, ‘Achieving 60% Renewable and Low Carbon Energy in the UK by 2030’, September 2018 – pdf available at labour.org.uk. 81. Labour Party, ‘It’s Time for Real Change: The Labour Party Manifesto 2019’, November 2019, pp. 60, 73 – pdf available at labour.org.uk. 82.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
by Dominic Frisby
Published 1 Nov 2014

An investigation might not be worth the cost for the amount it levies. This, of course, raises all sorts of moral issues. But taxation, in its current form, will be harder to enforce and more costly to levy. In all probability, we’ll move towards the taxation of consumption and assets, rather than labour – a land value tax, even (see the footnote for more on land value tax177). Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Ethereum – dubbed ‘Bitcoin 2.0’ – says to me: I think it’s going to go to a national sales tax. If you’re a business you’re going to probably have a physical footprint because you have warehouses, you have to store products, you have a store front, you have to register with the government.

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Riegel, ‘The New Approach to Freedom’, Chapter 3, The Heather Foundation, 2003, http://bit.ly/1tHF956. 173 Michael McLeay, Amar Radia, Ryland Thomas, ‘Money creation in the modern economy’, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Q1 2014. 174 Dominic Frisby, Life After the State (London, Unbound, 2013). 175 ‘National Average Wage Index 2012,’ US Social Security Administration, accessed March 17, 2014, http://1.usa.gov/1trvGLy. 176 The average UK wage has gone from around from £2,000 per annum in 1971 to around £25,000 in 2014. 177 The most obvious form of consumption tax, and the hardest to hide, is to tax use of the land – land value tax. Its proponents argue that it would also bring about the much needed re-balancing of land ownership. Seventy per cent of the UK, for example, is owned by 0.7% of the people – and they receive subsidy for it. A world in which they have to pay tax on that land, instead of receiving subsidy for it, would see many sell land they are not making use of because it has become a liability rather than an asset. 178 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 14, 2008, accessed March 17, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7NC.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

Thus, paradoxically, improving land can raise the value of the underlying unimproved land, creating a disincentive to make improvements. I think these difficulties, which apply to some degree to other kinds of natural capital, are resolvable, but a detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this book. 5. For example, land could gradually be bought out from private ownership by instituting a 3-percent land-value tax initially paid for by existing equity so that owners would only have to start paying the tax thirty-three years later. 6. Economist Henry Simons wrote to Fisher in 1934, “Savings-deposits, treasury certificates, and even commercial paper are almost as close to demand deposits as are demand deposits to legal-tender currency.

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In addition, today it is possible to profit by depleting aspects of the commonwealth such as biodiversity, aquifers, soil, ocean fisheries, and so on. These properly belong to all of us, and their depletion should only happen by common agreement and for the common good. Transition and policy: Some states and nations already levy land-value taxes, and others have nationalized oil and minerals. The country of Bolivia and the state of Alaska, for example, assert public ownership over oil rights, so that oil companies earn money only for their services in extracting the oil, and not from owning the oil. Shifting the tax burden away from labor and toward property will become more and more attractive as wage earners’ situations become desperate.

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Shifting the tax burden away from labor and toward property will become more and more attractive as wage earners’ situations become desperate. Finally, as intractable regulatory battles over water rights show, building resource conservation directly into the money system is an idea whose time is coming. Measures such as Georgist land-value taxes, leasing of mineral rights, and the use of the subjects of economic rent as a currency backing as described in this book are ways to return economic rents to the people, so that private interests can only profit by using property well, not by merely owning it. Anything that comes from the commons should be subject to fees or taxes.

Basic Income And The Left
by henningmeyer
Published 16 May 2018

My aim here is to respond to one partic‐ ular point made more than once: a Citizen’s Income would be unaffordable. This is a complex question to which a variety of responses might be offered. Several of those responses would not be viable in the short or medium term but might be possible in the longer term: for instance, new forms of taxation, such as a financial transaction tax or land value tax, or the creation of new money, along the lines of the quanti‐ tative easing practised by central banks since the financial crisis. None of these funding methods 96 97 would be easy to establish, and the likelihood of benefits related to housing (Housing Benefit, being able to implement one of them at the same Council Tax Benefit, and the housing component of time as introducing a Citizen’s Income would be Universal Credit) are substantial in areas of high close to zero.

A Fine Mess
by T. R. Reid
Published 13 Mar 2017

Piketty calls for personal income tax rates as high as 80% and for an international wealth tax, like the one that’s used in France, to extract even more from the richest taxpayers. George, in contrast, came up with a distinctive approach to taxation—indeed, an idea so radical it had not been tried before. This new system he called the Land Value Tax, or simply the Single Tax. — FROM THE ECONOMISTS, George took the basic principle that when you tax something, you generally get less of it. Therefore, a tax on labor—such as an income tax or a payroll tax deduction for Social Security—would lead people to work less and reduce overall productivity.

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While Henry George was a radical, though, he was not so radical as to call for confiscation of private property. In his system, the rich could keep their land, but they were to be taxed to pay for this privilege. “The land belongs equally to all, and land values . . . should be shared among all.” George proposed that governments impose a heavy tax on the value of land. In fact, this Land Value Tax was to be so heavy that the revenues would be enough to replace the income from all other forms of taxation. All governments would need only one form of tax. And because this Single Tax would be paid almost entirely by the landowning elites, working people would be free to spend and save their earnings without the need to fund government through other forms of taxation.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

The regulation, taxation, and control of land have been important areas of European political contest and public policy. But it was a nineteenth century American economist, Henry George, who popularized the idea that increases in the value of land ought to be seen as a public rather than private benefit and so pioneered a proposal for a land value tax. George’s ideas fell on largely stony soil in his own country, where land was seen as a birthright, but had some impact on economic scholarship and policies in Europe as well as some postcolonial nations like Singapore and Australia. Today the United States is pretty cramped in many of its most productive cities and regions.

Big Capital: Who Is London For?
by Anna Minton
Published 31 May 2017

This has been investigated and recommended by government inquiry after government inquiry.fn3 It is part of the system in countries including Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong and parts of the US and Australia, which are hardly bastions of socialism but which are prepared to intervene in property markets to safeguard decent housing. And it is a view shared by John Muellbauer, Professor of Economics at Oxford, who argues that a land value tax could play a part in stabilizing house prices. Politicians as diverse as the former Conservative planning minister Nicholas Boles and Green MP Caroline Lucas have made the case for it.15 But despite the ongoing discussion the government has not made any serious attempt to study its feasibility.fn4 Given the inertia, the emerging political alliance around the housing crisis across income groups, in civil society and among some politicians needs to make this a priority.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

In keeping with the main argument of this book, we need not only to tax the rich and redistribute wealth back to the rest, but to cut back their sources of unearned income in the first place. First, rent. The most obvious way to stop private owners from extracting rent (beyond covering construction and maintenance costs) from others is to nationalise land and minerals, so that rent comes under democratic control, or for the state to tax ground rent through a land-value tax. Those who are horrified by the idea of land nationalisation need to be reminded that it need not prevent people owning buildings and benefitting from improving them and the land; it’s just a matter of recovering for society the gains made from the privatisation of nature and space itself. Although state-controlled rents are likely to be much lower than private rents they can still be set higher in the more sought-after areas than in less-popular areas.

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And in much more equal societies, differences in what land and property users are willing to pay will reflect mainly differences in their needs and wants rather than differences in income. However, under international law, nationalisation of land would require compensation of landowners (in effect, compensating them for the loss of the benefit of providing a disservice to tenants), whereas states are free to charge whatever taxes they like. A land-value tax has been favoured on the Right as well as the Left: in the US, it was advocated by the capitalist reformer Henry George. It would, he argued, stop landowners siphoning profits from enterprises in the form of rent and thereby holding back development. In the 18th century, it was supported by Adam Smith.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

For example, billions of dollars of money flooding into our property market from former Soviet republics is not helping Britain as a whole: while it may make wealthier homeowners feel richer and deliver windfalls to estate agents and City bankers, it squeezes others out of the property market – and also poses many other dangers, such as feeding boom-and-bust economics, or serving as a vector for wealthy foreign owners to corrupt our politics.11 Policies to control these inflows could range from outright bans on certain kinds of investment in the property market; to radical transparency, forcing the names of the beneficial owners of all real estate in Britain into the public domain; to a land value tax, levied on the value of each square metre of underlying land, which could jimmy a stream of tax revenues out of wealthy foreigners who own land in the UK, and channel this towards compelling social priorities, such as a basic income. A land value tax would be, if set up right, unavoidable: even if the land were held under an impenetrable Cook Islands trust, if whoever owns or controls or benefits from it does not cough up the right amount of tax each year, the land (or a portion of it) would be forfeit and you can send the bailiffs in.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Many of today’s rich in the UK come from families whose original riches can be traced back to slave ownership or violence; others are recent arrivals from other countries, with dubious stories concerning how they made their money. 104. N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands. 105. It is of course an old campaign. Winston Churchill even supported a land value tax – perhaps because, although born at Blenheim Palace, he never owned it or had a chance of owning such a property. See C. Joseph, ‘Duke’s Dissolute Son Kicks Heroin Habit … and Wins Back His Birth-Right – the Keys to Blenheim Palace – in Amazing Tale of Redemption’, Daily Mail, 18 November 2012. 106.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

An immigrant from Curaçao, De Leon was a lecturer at Columbia School of Law when he became active in the 1886 mayoral candidacy of Henry George. George was backed by the Central Labor Union, a New York–area union broadly Marxist in orientation. George’s own politics, however, were eclectic. He was the best-selling author of Progress and Poverty, which advocated an egalitarian land value tax. The idea was that people should control the fruits of their own labor, but land and other natural resources belonged to society as a whole. George finished second in the election (beating out future president Theodore Roosevelt), and De Leon was denied a full-time job at Columbia for his political activity.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

These can all be understood as a kind of technocratic utopianism — they rely on the assumption that society can be transformed from above and that making one or two radical policy changes will completely transform the economy. Many of these policies are not incorrect or bad, but their adherents often prescribe them as the solution to all the world’s problems, without considering how we got to where we are in the first place. Policy prescriptions — from wealth taxes and land value taxes, to financial reform and housing reform — have to be situated within their political economic context. It is meaningless to speak of “policy” without speaking of power. Neoliberal governments have no interest in funda- mental economic reform as their primary constituency is the wealthy elite.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

For a long time, her greatest claim to fame came through an act of political performance art, placing a mock advertisement in a local paper that put herself on the market as a “young woman American slave”—protesting the oppressive wage gap between male and female salaries, and mocking the mercenary nature of many traditional marriages. Magie was also a devotee of the then-influential economist Henry George, who had argued in his 1879 best-selling book Progress and Poverty for an annual “land-value tax” on all land held as private property—high enough to obviate the need for other taxes on income or production. Many progressive thinkers and activists of the period integrated “Georgist” proposals for single-tax plans into their political platforms and stump speeches. But only Lizzie Magie appears to have decided that radical tax reform might make compelling subject matter for a board game.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

And that’s on top of the fact that a basic income would in and of itself help slow our overheated production down a bit by releasing people from the pressure of having to work for forty or even sixty hours a week simply in order to stay alive. A basic income could be funded in a variety of ways, including progressive taxes on commercial land use, like the land value tax made famous by the American economist Henry George, or taxes on capital gains, foreign currency transactions and financial transactions, such as the Robin Hood tax suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin. Another approach might be to tax the $32 trillion of private wealth that is presently hidden away in offshore tax havens, and use the proceeds for direct cash transfers.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

., “The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870-2015”, NBER Working Paper Series, 24112, May 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w24112 4 Milton Friedman himself stated that it would be the “least bad tax”. The Economist also tacitly supported it in a 2015 piece even if remaining skeptical about its implementation: “Why Henry George had a point”, Economist, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-value-tax 5 Sheidel, W., The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), pg. 94 6 A 1997 study showed that as many as 8% of CEOs were directly interlocked. A far larger share are just a few steps in the network away from each other, essentially turning the Hallock, K.F., “Reciprocally Interlocking Boards of Directors and Executive Compensation”, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 32(3), Sep. 1997, https://doi.org/10.2307/2331203 7 The principal-agent problem has it that principals (shareholders) and agents (executives) have different objectives, with the former looking to maximize firm value whereas the latter seek their own self-interest (higher pay, creating empires).

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 11 Apr 2011

This is not a tax on property ownership, but a tax on land: whether or not that piece of prime real estate is owned by a Russian oligarch hidden behind a Liechtenstein anstalt, the bricks of the building sited there are rooted firmly into the soil, and the tax can be levied. Because land cannot move, this tax is insulated against offshore escape. It encourages and rewards the best use of land and keeps rents lower than they would otherwise be. Not only that, but a huge share of the profits of the financial sector derive ultimately from real estate business and land value. Tax land’s rental value, and you capture a big slice of this financial business, however much it is reengineered offshore. When Pittsburgh became one of the few places in the world to adopt the tax in 1911, in the teeth of massive resistance from wealthy landowners, it had dramatic and positive effects: While the rest of America went on an orgy of land speculation ahead of the Crash of 1929, prices in Pittsburgh only rose 20 percent.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

It was three days before they spotted that the costings required Labour to reverse the tax break for married couples brought in by Cameron – and even then the BBC seemed uninterested, an incident that led to furious rows between Rob Oxley and Laura Kuenssberg, the political editor, and her boss Katy Searle. Sheridan Westlake, one of the party’s most forensic brains, spotted Labour’s admission that they might replace council tax with a ‘land value tax’, which he quickly dubbed a ‘garden tax’ because those with larger properties would be hit hard. Yet the Tories became so distracted by their own manifesto and the subsequent terrorist attacks that they made little use of Westlake’s work until the final days of the campaign. One senior CCHQ official said, ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing that George Osborne would have picked up on.’

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

The Conservative opposition wanted tariffs to fund both the armed forces and the social services while the Liberals wanted income taxes and excise duties instead. The budget went through, ignoring these views and entrenching taxes rather than tariffs as sources of state income. The best-known increases in taxes were those on very high incomes, a proposed land value tax and death duties, which affected only the very rich. In fact, the increase in these was roughly matched by increases in excise duties, paid largely by the working class. The so-called People’s Budget financed the controversial 1909 naval programme. The Liberal government had first proposed starting four battleships in the 1909–10 financial year.